Which US and European Higher Education Institutions are visible in ResearchGate and what affects their RG Score?

TL;DR

This study examines the presence of US and European higher education institutions on ResearchGate in 2017 and evaluates whether their RG Scores accurately reflect their academic impact, finding a strong correlation with research volume.

Contribution

It provides an empirical analysis of institutional presence on ResearchGate and assesses the validity of RG Scores as indicators of academic impact.

Findings

Most institutions had ResearchGate profiles, especially PhD-awarding ones.

Presence correlates with institution size and publication volume.

RG Scores mainly reflect research output, not visibility or impact.

Abstract

While ResearchGate has become the most popular academic social networking site in terms of regular users, not all institutions have joined and the scores it assigns to academics and institutions are controversial. This paper assesses the presence in ResearchGate of higher education institutions in Europe and the US in 2017, and the extent to which institutional ResearchGate Scores reflect institutional academic impact. Most of the 2258 European and 4355 US higher educational institutions included in the sample had an institutional ResearchGate profile, with near universal coverage for PhD-awarding institutions found in the Web of Science (WoS). For non-PhD awarding institutions that did not publish, size (number of staff members) was most associated with presence in ResearchGate. For PhD-awarding institutions in WoS, presence in RG was strongly related to the number of WoS publications. In conclusion, a) institutional RG scores reflect research volume more than visibility and b) this indicator is highly correlated to the number of WoS publications. Hence, the value of RG Scores for institutional comparisons is limited.